between being young and being right (you were my versailles at night)
by BerryliciousCheerio
Summary: Something ancient in you screams. / (or: in all her lives, allison loved lydia)


**did u want a companion resurrection piece from allison's pov? no? well, sucks to suck then**

**(i should have been working on an essay about chronicle of a death foretold and about a million other things but this ship has _ruined_ me)**

**disclaimed**

* * *

**...**

* * *

Death is simple. Painless. Scott's hands should be warm on you, but all you feel is cold.

Your last words are good, you think. Clean.

The best you can do.

You hear her scream—

it _burns_ you.

**...**

At first—

it's dark.

A heavy blanket, weighing you down; all you know is the dark. It is cold, too—

empty, and your hands ache for something you never want to name. That you have never been allowed to name.

You thought you would see Kate. Your mother. Thought you would be able to set things right with Erica and Boyd. You thought you deserved salvation.

All the blood on your hand speaks to the contrary.

**...**

(it is dark.

and then there is lydia)

**...**

You think that this might be purgatory, might be where sinners come to pay their penance, and _god_, have you sinned. You sit in the darkness and time passes—how much, you're not sure.

You sit and you pray.

Your mother was traditional—girls who love girls are wrong, are sick, but when you kissed Lydia that once, it was the best thing you'd ever done. You had hoped that your god would be merciful. Would let you behind the gates and let you be at peace, but this is oddly appropriate.

You hope that Lydia's safe—that the pack made it out, but mostly _Lydia_. You wish you could have said goodbye.

Your thoughts make your time near unbearable, but soon you find peace; find the quiet place in your mind where you remember Scott and innocent kisses; Isaac and suits; your father's pancakes. _Lydia_—

her hands and her laugh and the way she would smile at you, in your car, the night and infinity stretching out before you. Little things—

what brought you joy when you were—

when you weren't here.

**...**

(it is dark)

**...**

Time has no bearing, here, but you've counted the minutes as a way to keep sane, keep calm; counted beats of sixty, tapping your knees. It has been forty thousand three hundred twenty four minutes, thirty six seconds, since you woke here, and suddenly there is light.

A flash of red.

You hear her voice before you see her—

but it's not _her_. Not really. A different version of her. Younger. Innocent.

"Aya," she laughs, reaching out for you—she must be reaching for you, right? "Follow me."

Everything is familiar, from the dirt to the trees to the way that her body presses against yours when you're past the city limits and she backs you against a tree, out of sight of the main road. Her hands are greedy, well-practiced as they roam your sides, her lips on your jaw. You react on instinct, dragging her dress up her body, hands slipping under.

The trees rustle around you.

She gasps.

The scene changes.

Lydia is sobbing, straining to break away from a couple that you have no names for, that must be her parents. She screams for you and a man—her husband secures the ties around your arms and you spit in his face. You do not regret taking the blame, taking the punishment—

the river is cold, but no colder than your heart.

**...**

(ancient blood hums in your veins—stardust and eternal matter, impossible to destroy. goodbye was never an option)

**...**

You hear the screaming for what must be days. It echoes in your prison—you can't count the minutes anymore. The wails are animalistic—distinctly human, but raw and grief stricken. They sound like pain. Like death. Like a banshee.

**...**

You are no longer in the dark—it's empty, where you are. A room, with a hole in the floor that you step around carefully.

Sometimes it shows you the pack. Scott, fists clenched and bloody; Kira, by his side. Stiles, pale and weak, eyes dark and bags heavy. Isaac and his grief, his blame. Derek, in his chains in Mexico. Your father, barely surviving.

It never shows you Lydia.

**...**

(copper fills your mouth, but when you touch your lips, your fingers come away clean)

**...**

You're never hungry—never thirsty. Human constraints seem to have abandoned you, but _god_, you would give everything you have and have ever had just to feel her skin again.

**...**

The second vision—the second life is when you figure it out.

You see her standing in her doorway, hand pressed to her mouth and shoulders shaking, and your chest aches, from emotion and from where the silver cut you, and you want her, want her with you, near you always, and you think that this is what a soulmate is—someone you have loved in every lifetime, someone that you find, someone you can never lose.

You never really thought much about reincarnation—never considered living more than the life you were given, here, now.

But you die in Greece, leave her alone again, arrows forced into your ribs.

You die, and you are grateful that you see her again.

**...**

In all your lives—you don't ever remember this. The waiting.

The wheel screeches to a halt around you.

**...**

(your story is epic—

from before you had words to describe it, the letters to write out _i love you_ on the smooth skin of her shoulder; she was yours as much as you were hers, hearts promised long before you even had them.

you can't imagine just one lifetime with her)

**...**

You hear her voice. Wrecked and broken—

"_Leave me alone, Stiles_," she snaps, and you scramble for the hole, hope that you can see her, but all you see are her hands, shaking on her keyboard, knuckles bloody.

"God," you gasp. "Lydia."

Her hands still; she flexes her fingers, and you hear Stiles ask if she's okay.

"_M'fine,_" she answers slowly, digging her nails into her palms. "_Just thought I heard something_."

**...**

(you scream her name, over and over, until your throat is raw and you taste iron, but you never get a response. finally, you stop.

maybe she's healing.

maybe she never heard you at all)

**...**

You learn more about your past lives, map them all out until you know them better than you do your own body—

all the times that you and Lydia found each other and all the times you didn't.

In 1918, you pass her in the train station, your son's hand heavy in your own. Your heart kicks, and you swallow the bile that rises at the back of your throat.

That might be the worst, of all the things you see—the times when you know you should know her.

The times when you can't.

**...**

Meditation is soothing, but it can't overpower the chanting that fills your head. An old language—something you don't recognize, but that makes it hard to breathe. The voice is achingly familiar.

The incantation gives way to something else, something newer—

"_Revenez à moi,_" she repeats, over and over. "_J'ai besoin de toi." Come back to me._ _I need you. _

You feel a tug in the pit of your stomach, in your chest. You hear her like she's standing next to you.

_Come back to me._

**...**

(it is dark)

**...**

(and then there is lydia)

**...**

You fall through the hole.

**...**

(whatever asshole called it falling in love—

they were wrong.

you fall for love)

**...**

You wake in Mexico, Kate leaning over you, her face terrible and beautiful and _not human_. "Welcome back, sweetie," she hums, and there's dirt in your mouth, the scent of death around you, smothering you.

You choke, sputter, and your hands are bloody, nails torn and fingertips ragged, from—

you vomit, then. Ruined from when you dug yourself out of your grave. Your feet ache, blisters burst and raw—fuck, did you walk here?

You want to scream, want to cry, want the days you lost, the days between falling and waking here. The dark is suffocating. Kate is brutal still, her hands rough but so gentle—

she had always loved you best, and she helps you get clean, get _alive_, so you sit at her side dutifully, heart beat steady and tied to another miles away.

**...**

(you had expected flaming hair; pursed lips and smooth hands, savage beats of your heart in time with hers.

you're breathing, though—

maybe that should be enough)

**...**

It has been weeks. You learn to walk again, to breathe, shaky at first, but Kate presses steel into your veins.

"You'll never be helpless again," she promises you, canines bared—predatory, feline in her desperation. You want to ask her how she knew. One day, when you've stared at the walls of your cell—_room_ for hours, she tells you, "I didn't think Ginger would be too keen on letting you stay—."

She chokes on the word.

It has been weeks and neither of you can say it.

**...**

You never sleep well; your nights are spent twisted up in the blankets, palms open, waiting.

You wonder if she sleeps the same.

**...**

You begin to bleed. Unstoppable, painless—

it coats you, spills from your mouth and nose and ears, from under your nails and from your eyes, even. Kate finds you, ruby red, and even she—your brutal, reckless aunt—she stumbles.

"Fuck, sweetie," she hisses, stepping back to the doorway. You have to spit out the blood that fills your mouth to respond.

"Lydia," you choke, mean it as a warning and an elegy, and your hands shake, heartbeat so strong, so fast in your throat.

There is no one else—no other that could have done this, could have brought you home, could have blood pooling at your feet. There is a buzzing in your ears, threatening to deafen you and your heart is pounding so hard, so fast—

Kate hears the cars before you.

"Get to the back," Kate commands, but your pulse is thrumming, electric, and she's _here_, you can feel her around you, within you, her presence warm and real and unrelenting, beating into you until all you know is _Lydia_.

**...**

(to be fair—

all you've ever known has been lydia)

**...**

Kate tells them to leave Derek, take you instead, and you see it, see the flicker of doubt shadow Lydia's face—

she would leave him in a heartbeat. You swallow thickly at the realization.

She looks so much older, aged centuries in the months you've been gone.

You're not surprised.

**...**

Braeden leaves a hole in your chest where Kate used to live—

you had mourned her once and you had never prepared for a day where you have to repeat, but then Lydia is _here_, and the grief, ragged and new as it may be, is easily pushed aside, because Lydia's touching you, running her fingertips over your arms and back and face, and she's crying and you think that maybe she believes you're not real.

"_God_," she chokes out, and she's shaking in your arms, sobbing into your shirt. She looks up at you, and the blood on you has stained her, streaked across her cheeks. She looks every bit the wailing woman. "Allison," she breathes, shuddering. "You were _gone_."

And the rest of your pack is buzzing around nervously, Scott and Kira exchanging a look that you try to miss. Stiles, from his place beside Malia, whispers, "I didn't think it would work," and he looks shocked, impressed—

scared.

You understand it.

Lydia's scars stand out against her pale skin, raised and stark and unmistakably for you—her palms are uneven on your cheeks. You cover her hands with your own, lower them gently, to your chest, let her feel your heartbeat, unsteady as it may be.

There is time to talk later—now you see her and every version of her that has come before, all the incarnations of Lydia that fought, wild and unrelenting, to keep you by her side. She is stronger in this life than she has ever been before—

she came close in Salem, but her technique was rushed, newly learned and unpracticed, but _now_.

Now she is vicious and violent, determined, and power hums in her pores—

the desert falls silent around her.

Resurrection is not for the faint of heart.

**...**

(you hold her the entire drive back to beacon hills. she looks at you as if she expects you to disappear, and your heart aches)

**...**

It's hard to watch your father cry—harder still to know how much he must have cried after you—

you catch him speaking to Lydia, after you've showered, washed the blood of your rebirth from your hair, and he is grateful, sincere, and Lydia looks so tired and haunted—

you slip your hand in hers and she looks up at you, eyes wide. She is fragile and she is iron; still water and a tidal wave, all at once, and her love for you is constant, steady—

your father nods his shaky approval, and her hand is warm in yours.

**...**

(you ask her to stay the night. and the next. and the next.

forever, if she's willing)

**...**

"Is this okay?" you murmur, her breath warm against your lips as you lean in close, curling your hand over her cheek. It is the first night, and Lydia tilts her chin up, barely eases her lips against yours.

It's not quite a kiss, yet—a promise, a breath of one. She nods—

you've kissed her for centuries, but this feels new, tentative. You have the promise of eternity lying before you, yours for the taking, and the thought has you kissing her again and again, curling your fingers around her wrists, the scars alive and electric beneath you.

**...**

(she keeps her palm pressed against your stomach, over the scar that marked the end and the beginning—

some nights you still feel the sword, but she is gentle in her worship)

**...**

"Do you remember?" she whispers, fingers laced and legs tangled with yours. The dark is safe when she's near, but you keep the bathroom light on anyway—it casts a shadow over her face as she waits for your answer.

"I remember you," you tell her finally, words simple, because that's the truth—you never relived anything other than her in all your time gone. You know things about your past that you didn't before—know all the names you had and the hometowns and the adventures, but you only saw her. "I remember you in all of my lives." Lydia nods, eyes downcast, suddenly shy.

"I remember loving you in every one of them," you add, moving close to rest your forehead against hers. She keeps her logic sound and her voice even, but you feel her frown.

"We didn't meet in every one."

She lets go of your hand to play with your fingers, brings them up to kiss them, gentle as always. You kiss her forehead carefully, smoothing the furrow with your lips.

"But I loved you. I didn't have to meet you to love you."

You think that maybe some of her burden is lessened, and she tucks herself against you, lips at your collarbone.

You sleep soundly.

**...**

(when you wake, lydia is still asleep, arm loosely circled around your waist and her expression serene. you don't think you've ever loved her more.

her body is warm, pliant, still heavy with sleep, but you bring her closer with ease)

**...**

The apartment is your prison now—you understand the reasons for your confinement, but it makes it no easier to swallow. People still think you're—

gone.

They mourned you, Lydia promises. "The entire town mourned you," she tells you, lining up your hands in the middle of the night, when you've jerked awake for the third time this week. "We had a candlelight vigil."

And you can nearly see it—your friends, solemn and stoic; Lydia, alight.

"That was where—," she bites her sentence off, paling, and she drops your hands, shaking too much to continue.

You're not sure what all she did—

what all she sacrificed to breathe life back into you, but you've caught her rubbing her wrists more often than you'd like to think about. She does it now, eyes hazy and unfocused, and she stares at you blankly, just below your mouth.

You've thanked her a thousand times—with words and mouths and hands, printing _I love you_ into her DNA until it's practically burned into her skin.

But still.

She carries around a sadness inside of her so vast, all consuming, and you worry that maybe she's slipping away—gave herself up in your place. There's an unyielding chasm opening up inside of her and sometimes she holds you like you're her last hope.

But she hides it well—

brings you coffee and takeout and apologizes with rueful smiles that don't meet her eyes about not being able to take you on a proper date. She doesn't want you to see. But you do.

And when you do, you draw her close, tucking her head beneath your chin and wrapping your arms around her, and she's so _small_. You sometimes forget that, sometimes think that she's all-powerful, invulnerable, which, yeah, sometimes she is, but she is also only seventeen. Seventeen and scared and in love, and you tug her towards you now, pressing a kiss to her cheek, murmur, "I love you," against her skin.

She freezes when you do, as if she half expects you to withdraw it, not mean it in the way that you do, in the way that she does. You can't imagine that—

a world where you didn't love Lydia Martin with every fiber of your being is a world that you never want to see.

"I sometimes think that this is a dream," she whispers into your neck. "That I'll wake up and you'll be _gone_ again."

And this is as close to a confession as she'll make, you know, so you tighten your hold on her, keep her grounded. There's only so much you can do—

you wish you could shoulder the burden, the pain, but she outlived you in every life; she was the one that buried you, every time, and there's nothing you can do to fix those years she spent alone, spent mourning you.

"It felt like—," she chokes, shuddering against you. "I felt the sword. Every night."

You wonder how many lives she's had to say something similar—how many times people didn't understand.

It's dark in your apartment, still. Lydia's breathing shallow, shuddering against your collarbone; she balls her hands into your shirt like a child—you're both just kids, immortal, endless.

She wrote a new ending for your story.

You kiss her and taste the stars.

**...**

She calls her body a ruin, when you're so drunk on love that it barely registers—

you almost laugh because you're pretty convinced that she's the sun, condensed into something mortal, something that you can touch without burning up—

you think that she'd bleed gold.

But her voice is so solemn, truthful. "All my years," she breathes into your mouth. "I've always ended ruined."

Her fingers curl inside you. Something ancient in you screams.

**...**

Your father insists on leaving—you have no place to argue, when you spend most of your days complaining about the four walls of your home. You leave under cover of dark, Lydia warm and reticent and alive beside you, trying her hardest to keep her smile bright whenever you look at her.

It's a long drive to the airport, and your father is at the wheel, lets you pull Lydia's legs into your lap with little more than a raise of his eyebrows.

She'd intended to leave you at the ticketing lines, but her lip trembles a little when she glances at the security line; before you can stop her, she's marching to the closest counter, asking for a ticket on the next flight that's leaving.

You're pretty sure that she's added to about ten watch lists in that moment, but she stares the man at the desk down and he does as he's bid, which—you've been on the receiving end of some patented Lydia Martin stares and yeah, you'd do the same if you were in his shoes. And you know that her credit is in shambles—

"Lydia," you admonish lightly, crossing your arms to keep from grabbing her hand.

"What?" she raises an eyebrow. "I've always wanted to go to—," she glances at her ticket. Makes a face. "Minnesota." And you can't help it—

she is so impulsive, so very determined—you laugh and reach out to pull her in to a kiss, rolling your eyes at her pout. Your father finds something to do over near the beginning of the security line, fumbling with his suitcase. Lydia smiles against your lips, pleased with the results of her decision, and she wraps an arm around your waist when you pull away, keeps you next to her the entire way through security, all the way to your gate.

Your father keeps away, strikes up a conversation with the old woman knitting beside him—you think that maybe they begin exchanging tips, a fact that you file away for later—and you sit on the ground with Lydia, in the corner, and she protests half-heartedly about the dirty ground, about the skirt she's wearing, but you tug her back to lean against your chest, press your heartbeat into the curve of her spine, bowing beneath a burden so great that it threatens to crush you both some days.

"I really love you," you murmur into her hair. "So much." Lydia hums, relaxing into you. You readjust, trying hard to not get a mouthful of her hair. "More than stars in the sky," you continue. "More than years on this earth."

The airport is quiet—Tuesdays in the middle of October aren't a popular travel date, you think.

Lydia says something in Latin, her words familiar and wrapping around you, comforting, but you're _leaving_ her, leaving her to shoulder the burden, cross the chasm herself. You don't have a choice, but you feel like you chose wrong.

She still calls herself a ruin, something marred, but you both have scars, both carry the evidence of the other like a birthmark, a bruise, never fading. You wear her love like battle armor, a shield on the nights when you remember the darkness, the screaming. The way she cried for you in your first life.

France will be good—

will be _away_, but away and good are one and the same now, now that you're Lazarus, Lydia your messiah.

But.

Lydia's breathing is shaky at best, even now, even when she's relaxed and practically curled in your lap, her hands trembling, but she looks at you like you reined in the sun for her.

"Visit me," you request, nudging your nose against her temple. "I want to show you Paris." And the coast. The countryside. The entire country, if she wants. The world, even.

She turns her face into your neck, presses a kiss to your pulse, where the life she breathed into you thrums steadily, ancient blood and eternal matter never ending.

This is not goodbye.

**...**

(lydia writes you letters. you skype, call, text as well, but the first letter arrives in november, her script elegant and looping as she tells you about the empty space in her bed that she can't fill, even when sleeping in the middle.

_my heart is transatlantic_, she writes. _i'm learning french to tell you all the ways i love you_.

you write back with a poem, in french.

_practice with this_, you tell her, putting lipstick on just to seal it)

**...**

You still wake up shaking sometimes, a scream caught in your throat, but you learn to breathe without Lydia beside you, counting out beats of eight for you to match. Which is good—

you both were too wrapped up in one another to be healthy, and you need to learn to stand on your own again, but you miss her so much some days, your body actually aches.

You call her when your city is still dark, and the guilt gnaws at you for a moment before you remember—you think that even if it was the middle of the night in Beacon Hills, she would still answer.

"Hey baby," she greets, the same as always, and she's doing homework or making dinner or maybe just expecting this call.

"Tell me about Chicago."

Sometimes you actually talk. Sometimes you just want to hear her voice.

Lydia's voice is soft when she begins, "Your name was Alice and you were kind of wonderful."

**...**

When spring comes, so does Lydia, bearing chocolates and laughing brightly when you hand her the bouquet you bought on the way to the airport. The flowers get slightly crushed between you, when she surges up to kiss you, burying her free hand in your hair.

"You look great," you tell her, and she does, really. You kind of regret not seeing the process, watching her slowly grow into herself again, but she's radiant—

sun and moon and stars, all in one, shining so brightly in front of you.

You hold her hand on the metro, smiling when she leans her head against your shoulder; your father returned to Beacon Hills a few weeks ago, soon after you turned eighteen, so the apartment is empty—

high ceilings and big windows and the light streams in and sets Lydia alight.

You've been tentative, hesitantly planning a future together, but this—

she stands in your living room and grins at you and you think that this feels like eternity.

**...**

(_i got accepted to university, _she whispers that night, the city lights dancing over her naked back.

it feels like a promise)

**...**

_**fin**_


End file.
